‘Dr. Phil’ Exclusive: The Gypsy Rose Blanchard Jailhouse Interview

For more than a decade, Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a perfectly healthy young girl, was forced by her mother to use a wheelchair and additionally suffered unnecessary torturous medical procedures and painful surgeries as her seemingly devoted mother received praise from doctors and family.

“She said that I had muscular dystrophy,” Blanchard tells Dr. Phil during an exclusive interview airing Tuesday and Wednesday, November 21 and 22. “She told me that I couldn’t speak during the doctor’s appointment. She would tell me, ‘Just sit in your wheelchair, play with your Barbie dolls, and let me talk.’ And this continued on even into my 20s.”

Experts believe Blanchard, now 26, was the victim of a severe case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a relatively rare form of abuse in which a guardian exaggerates or induces illness in a child for attention and sympathy.

In June 2015, Blanchard’s mother, Dee Dee, was found fatally stabbed – a gruesome murder Blanchard claims she plotted with her boyfriend whom she met online. Blanchard pled guilty to second degree murder of her mother and is now serving a 10-year prison sentence in Missouri’s Chillicothe Correctional Center. Blanchard’s boyfriend was charged with first degree murder and pled not guilty. His trial is set for December 2017.

“I believe, firmly, that no matter what, murder is not OK. But at the same time, I don’t believe I deserve as many years as I got,” the young woman tells Dr. Phil. “I do believe that I do deserve to spend some time in prison for that crime but also, I understand why it happened and I don’t believe that I’m in the right place to get the help that I need.”